Finally someone has done what I never got around to doing. Tony Bourke, in a Newsforge article, does some reasonably extensive benchmarking of MySQL on various OS’s. Of course there’ll be the endless analysis of the various setups (read the comments for some IQ-lowering fun), but at a glance Linux 2.6 wins out, with FreeBSD 5.3 doing surprisingly badly. Looks like by accident/educated guess our choice of Gentoo with a 2.6 kernel made sense. One of our staff is looking at moving us to Red Hat, with a 2.4 kernel, so I’ll need to see some serious justification!
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Explains why I use FreeBSD 4.X and compile MySQL with linuxthreads. I still don’t consider FreeBSD 5.X as being production ready although I admin various FreeBSD 5.X boxes.